By David Wolfe
Simply put, you need to avoid hiring C-players at all costs.
In fact, cost is the reason. Hiring a C-player will cost you massive amounts of money. Dr. Bradford Smart says one out of every two hires in the U.S. is a mis-hire. What is a mis-hire? It’s when a new hire fails to meet the desired results within their first year in their position. That’s pretty much the definition of a C-player. According to Dr. Brad Smart, who leads the recruiting organization Top grading, a mis-hire will cost the organization somewhere between five and twenty-four times the annual salary of that position.Think about that for a minute. If a new hire has a base compensation at $102,692, then the net average cost of a mis-hire is$1,502,436 (14.6 times base compensation, plus opportunity costs, hiring fees, stress on other staff, lost revenue, etc.). For Nurse Practitioners, I calculated that at a cost of $830,239.12 for every mis-hire. Based on this, even hiring a B-player can be costly. The total cost of hiring a B-Player versus an A-player equates to $311,567.98 for an NP or PA.
The cost to your company in hiring the wrong person goes far beyond just the dollars. Consider the cost to your current staff, in terms of the stress caused by a mis-hire. Or consider how a mis-hire might actually cause you to lose patients. I have heard many stories of candidates presenting themselves well during the interview, being well spoken, and saying all the right things. But once they got hired and settled into the position, they were the exact opposite of how they presented themselves. They were a jerk to the staff. Worst of all, they were horrible with patients. I’ve heard many stories from smaller practice groups that really took a big hit and lost a sizable portion of their patients just because this one bad practitioner got in front of too many people before they figured out what the practitioner was doing. It takes a period of time, perhaps several months or even years, before you might get the feedback from patients and staff that lets you see what impact this mis-hire is having and how detrimental this person is to the whole organization and to the brand.
This is especially true in this age of constant ratings on the Internet and the need to keep patient satisfaction scores high. If a patient has a bad experience with a Nurse Practitioner or physician, you can bet that he or she is going to write about it on Yelp, Google, or on their Facebook page. Can you afford that kind of bad publicity?
“Nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field,” Jack Welch once said. “All the clever strategies and advanced technologies in the world are nowhere near as effective without great people to put them to work.”
Jack Welch employed all of these methods we are about to talk about when he grew GE in the 1980s and 1990s. He went from hiring 20 percent A-players to 80 percent in three years using these methods. Because of this, GE went from a $1.5 billion company to a $130 billion company.
Imagine if you were hiring 80 percent A-players. What would that do for you, your patients, your community, and your organization?
- Jack Welch, with Suzy Welch, Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book (New York: HarperCollins, 2009)
- Bradford Smart, “The Game-Changing Magic of Hiring A-Players for Your Organization,” Growth Institute, https:// blog.growthinstitute.com/topgrading/a-players.
- Bradford Smart, “Topgrading 201: How to Avoid Costly Mis-Hires,” 2012, https://topgrading.com/_tg-content/ downloads/Topgrading-eBook.pdf.